Self-Publishing: The Total Beginner's Guide

Don’t let anyone fool you: the book business is dirty. The chances of making your fortune out of writing are less than of winning the National Lottery, and only slightly less than being struck by lightning. I’ve certainly not made a fortune, indeed I can’t even say that I’ve ever remotely earned enough to give up the day job.

But I really enjoy writing, and I also enjoy helping others turn rough manuscripts into finished print novels which they will feel really proud of for the rest of their lives. Most of all, I derive enormous satisfaction that the self-publishing collective that I formed in 2012, Comely Bank Publishing, has become known for the quality of its products – not only the writing, but also our books’ physical qualities. Covers, paper, the way in which the book opens in your hands to reveal beautiful writing – these are the joys of reading. We set high standards.

The aim of Comely Bank Publishing was to guide writers towards low-cost, high-quality self-publishing – and that’s the aim of this book, too. It’s not a ‘get rich quick’ book, it’s a ‘how not to go bankrupt’ book. The book travels along many of the same journeys that I travelled as I picked my way through the publishing minefield.

Along the way, though, I made mistakes. I tried to make the most expensive ones when publishing my own books, since I felt a sense of responsibility when caring for others’ books. They say you learn more from your mistakes than from your successes: if so, I’m very well-informed indeed. You, the reader, can make your own judgement.

Some books try to cover a few aspects of self-publishing. This book attempts to cover everything, although there are bound to be aspects I’ve forgotten, missed out or will need to be revised in future editions. This won’t be the last edition of Self-Publishing – The Total Beginner’s Guide, for sure.

I don’t expect you to read your way through the entirety of this volume. By all means, skip whatever chapters you feel are unimportant. I’ve tried to make the book so cheap that you’ll find at least something of value in it somewhere, and you'll feel that your money has been well spent. It was originally intended to have cost you 99 pence, no more, but firms like Amazon make it all but impossible to sell ebooks at that low price. (By the way, if you bought this from Amazon, whatever you paid… the tax was 25p and I received just 43p. All the rest went into the pockets of our friends.) All the same, I do hope you paid that tiny sum. If you’ve not paid for your copy of my book, then should you really expect others to pay for copies of yours? The book is envisaged as an ebook, by the way, although there is also a print-on-demand version.

Read whatever you like. Take from it whatever you can. Occasionally you'll find something that I've covered already in a different part of the book. That's because I'm rather assuming that you'll jump about this ebook using the Contents links.

This work represents all I think I can offer you, the self-publishing reader, from my experience, although no doubt as soon as it has been published, I’ll remember something that should have been included. Perhaps you, the reader, will want something to be included that isn’t there, in which case I’m listening.

In the meantime, help yourself. I wish you well.

Gordon Lawrie,

Spring, 2020

Part 1

INTRODUCTION

What are you trying to do?

CHAPTER 1: ENTERING THE LION’S DEN

Sometime back in 2012, I found myself in the home of a retired professor in the south side of Edinburgh. I’d been helping him out with some stuff on his computer, and as we sat talking over a cup of tea afterwards, I happened to mention that I’d written a book and was finding it hard to land a publisher. I’d already tried all the local agents and publishers, collecting the usual batch of rejection slips, and wondered if he had any tips. This, after all, was a man who had written academic books in the relatively obscure area of Middle-Eastern Art, and surely he ought to have something to suggest. Even the odd word of encouragement, perhaps? He is, I should add, a really nice, gentle man.

Not a bit of it. When he discovered that I’d written a novel, he recoiled in horror. ‘Oh my goodness,’ he said as he picked himself back out of his chair. ‘Fiction – that’s like Daniel going into the lions’ den!’ As he gasped for breath, I could see him sizing up my cranium to see if in some way I was mentally impaired. When he’d completely recovered – which really did take a moment or two – he then managed to give me two pieces of advice, the first I’d ever received, and still the best. Here they are: repeat each one twenty times after me:

Develop a very, very thick skin.

Always, always, have a Plan B, a Plan C, a Plan D and a Plan E to fall back on.

I think I’m on Plan Q at the moment. More on that later.

…..oOo…..

I used to be a teacher, a secondary teacher at that, so you would think I would have a thick skin. But I knew I didn’t: I could get hurt quite easily and the only reason that I liked my job was because I fortunate enough to be able to work with youngsters who almost always wanted to be nice to me. Some of the other staff could be a pain in the rear end, mind you – we teachers are an odd bunch, I suppose – but I could close the door and shut them out for most of the day.

If you’ve never written any sort of book before, get ready for an assault on your self-esteem that will take your breath away. Putting yourself and your work out there for others to look at, whatever the art form, is an open invitation to them to say it’s awful, dreadful, unprofessional, unworthy, should never see the light of day again and an insult to their intelligence. And here’s the worst bit: not only do they get to say it, there is nothing at all to be gained by arguing back in your defence. Imagine you’ve just stepped into the ring with Mike Tyson for fifteen rounds, have your hands tied behind your back and have no mouthguard. The best you can hope for is that Mike’s not only a nice guy but is in a decent mood today. Otherwise you’re about to be beaten up. Badly.

In fact, I slowly began to realise that the very agents that I cursed at for rejecting my manuscript were actually quite pleasant about it. ‘It’s not for me’ is a favourite phrase, I discovered. And your manuscript is actually quite unlikely to be ‘for them’ if it’s never got further than the waste bin or – more likely, nowadays – the Trash folder of a computer desktop. Publishers and agents receive scores of unsolicited manuscripts each week and it’s all but impossible to pick out the diamonds from the dross efficiently. Panning for gold is actually easier, more reliable, and certainly better-rewarded. Everyone has heard stories of famous authors whose work has been passed over by countless publishers and agents before landing a contract and going on to make millions. Well, let me tell you something: no author in the world is so good that their work is guaranteed to be picked up by the first agent or publisher they approach.

Actually, that’s not true. There are first-time authors that publishers will fight for. They’re sports personalities, politicians, explorers, TV, film or rock stars, just about anyone in fact who is already rich from whatever they do as a day job. With only a few rare exceptions, they can’t write to save themselves (in some cases they’re genuinely illiterate, even saving themselves would be hard), and their autobiographies are ghost-written by someone chosen by the publisher and of whom you’ve never heard. Very occasionally, a top politician writes a memorable book, but it won’t happen if they’re trying to re-write history along the way. Alistair Darling’s account of the 2007-8 financial crisis, Back from the Brink, is well-written as well as being insightful; I’m told Boris Johnson did a decent biography of Churchill although I haven’t read it; and of course Barack Obama’s magnificent Dreams from My Father is dazzling. But demand for even Obama’s book only surged as he headed for The White House – it had been out for years. Sportsmen/writers are rare, although one outstanding exception is Marcus Trescothick’s self-penned account of dealing with depression as a test-match cricketer.

In fact, you should also face up to a hard truth right now: your first book is almost certainly awful. And I mean awful. Here comes the first of your kickings. If you really mean business as a writer, the first thing you should do after you’ve completed your first book is to write a second one. That certainly applies to novels. Books are like pancakes: the first one is usually only fit to be thrown away. They say everyone has a novel in them, but nobody promises it’ll be any good. And you don’t hear too many people saying that everyone has two, three or four novels in them. That takes stamina, discipline, and the ability to get up time and again from the floor when you’ve been knocked down. There’s that boxing analogy again.

My first book was so bad that only my wife has ever been allowed to read it. She was the one who suggested I bury it. If you’re desperate to read the worst I can manage, well, if you’ve ever seen the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, well, it’s right there. But I did at least complete it, all 110,000 turgid words of it, and I proved to myself that I could struggle through to the end. While I was writing the first one, I began to think how much more fun it would be to write a totally different novel, which became Four Old Geezers and a Valkyrie, and then I wrote some other stuff, too. Trying to get that published started me on a journey, a journey on which I’ve made countless mistakes, spent a lot of needless money, and occasionally got something exactly spot on. This little guide aims to share some of what I picked up along the way.

What I’ll try to take you through here will cover a lot of ground. I’ll try to show you your publishing options, then once we’ve gone through that we’ll move on to the main thrust of this book, self-publishing. We’ll deal with (in my humble opinion) the best ways to set about that: what sorts skills you either need to have or to hire; how you present yourself to the book industry and to the wider public; and finally I’ll try to take you into the difficult world of distribution and marketing. I make no secret of the fact that this book concentrates on self-publishing in the UK – that’s where I live, after all – but I’ll try to make reference to what works in other countries, too.

What I will not try to do is show you how to make a fortune. I don’t really know anything about that myself, and if you discover the secret, please let me know. I’m guessing the answer is a combination of hard work and exceptional luck might do it. But a sure-fire winner? I don’t think so. In fact, the publishing world is absolutely full of top-class, really excellent books that don’t sell at all, for reasons that are sometimes obvious, but more often will just cause you to scratch your head.

No, don’t give up the day job. What I hope to do here is to show you how to get your book out where people can read it, and with the minimum of financial risk to yourself. That means spending as little as possible without appearing to trade down in quality. And given that you’re not going to get rich, the next best thing will be not to lose money, and then, just once in a while, someone surprises you by saying that they’ve read your book and thoroughly enjoyed it. And they mean it, too. That’ll put you on cloud nine for the rest of the day, and deep down it’s also worth more than a few hundred pounds’ royalties.

CHAPTER 2: WHY DO YOU WANT TO WRITE A BOOK?

This seemingly innocent question is definitely something you should be thinking about early on. I don’t say ‘right from the outset’, because that’s not how it really happens, but it should certainly be circling the brain if you’ve managed to get so far as to be reading this book. Most people tinker about, trying to write poetry, short stories, essays, a little bit of a memoir or a journal, then they see what suits them best. Be careful, though: what you most like writing, what you’re best at writing, and what readers like you to write might be three quite different things. I freely admit that I’d love to write great literary prose, a Pulitzer- or Booker-Prizewinning novel, but I’m aware that it’s beyond me. Worse, I know that I’d look a literary poser if I were to try to write a mighty novel. I know my limitations. What’s more, literary fiction sells surprisingly poorly unless it wins some sort of award, or at least gets nominated. To win an award, the book has to be entered for it (it doesn’t happen automatically) and that costs money, copies of the book itself, and – usually – some sort of campaign to go with it. The big competitions won’t accept self-published work anyway, but even if they did, an ordinary writer would have no idea how to work the system to get his or her book noticed by judges.

The other novel I’d love to be able to write is crime fiction. To be honest, it’s what I like reading for pleasure myself, and I particularly enjoy reading detective or court-room thrillers set in cities I know. What’s more, if you’re good at it, you can make quite a bit of money. There’s a demand for crime, visible everywhere in bookshop windows and promotions tables, in supermarket shelves and in railway stations and airport terminals. But that takes skill, too. For me, crime fiction is the Everest of writing: not only does the writer need good writing, good characters and an interesting plot, crime fiction also requires the author to keep some sort of track of what’s going on with every thread of the story – and to tie each of them up at the end. Each chapter has to be roughly the same length, and to finish with some sort of cliffhanger, but at the same time the chapters need to vary in pace. Dramatic chapters need to be broken up with more reflective sections, different plotlines need to be kept ticking over regularly and so on. Good crime fiction requires discipline and planning. I tend to have neither. Maybe one day.

So why do you want to write a book? Do you have a story that you’re desperate to tell? Exactly who else will it interest, if anyone? I ask these questions because it’s good to know what you’re trying to do before you set out to do it. Too many people simply write a book aimlessly, assuming that they’ll find a purpose for their writing somewhere down the road. Are you hoping to make a living out of writing, or even better, get rich? Would you like to become famous? Is there some story that you feel needs to be told before you die and it’s lost for ever? Or are you simply writing for your own pleasure?

If your answer is ‘a bit of each of those’, then it’s time to get a grip of yourself – that’s no way to go about writing at all. In fact, it’s a very good way to make yourself very unhappy, really miserable, and it’s little wonder that so many writers – like painters – have mental health problems. If you’re going to write a book, then it’s vital to know why you’re doing it.

So, let’s take these reasons one by one.

1. I have a story to tell.

There’s a serious possibility that you have a story worth telling. But the key to what was in that last sentence is that you must have a story; you’re not just writing about something. If we start with fiction, your story will almost certainly have a central character, a series of events or mishaps will happen to that character, and then at the end we’ll find out how things are left as most, probably all, of the loose ends are tied up. I see this go wrong most often when someone – often a man, for some reason men seem particularly attracted to historical research – approaches me with an historical fiction manuscript. When I ask what the story is, the reply I get all too often is ‘well, you know the Xth century in La-La Land was an incredibly interesting period,’ and I’m yawning inwardly already. There are three things that count in fiction: the plot, the plot and the plot. The historical background is really just a pretty plate on which the story dish is served to the reader. A very good tip is this: does your story work if it’s translated into the 21st century, to the present day? If it does, then it should work well in an historical setting, too.

That story has to be compelling, though. It’s the plot that makes the reader want to keep turning the pages one after another, not the descriptions, or the characters, or even your beautiful writing. The reader might be interested in the characters, say, but only insofar as they interact with others, or with the general plot, or even occasionally the scenery – a desperate attempt to stay alive on an ice-cold mountain, say. But they’re not really interested in whether the character is gregarious or a loner, for instance, unless it affects the plot.

The same applies if you’re writing a memoir. I know this sounds harsh, but most people’s lives actually don’t merit a whole book to themselves. Something has to happen to make you interesting as a person – such as a memoir of your period in office as a politician, or when you were scoring loads of goals for Manchester United. Even then, you probably need to be able bring some interesting perspective to the story, because there’s little point in writing a story that everyone already knows about. There’s only so much you can say about scoring goals, for instance, but if the writer also has an insight into the internal dressing-room conflicts, or perhaps is dealing at the same time with personal health problems, then the book becomes interesting. Michelle Obama’s book Becoming attracted millions of readers because it’s about her close-up view of, and relationship with, the President of the United States, and a charismatic one at that. (It helps that she’s pretty charismatic herself.)

So, your story might not be quite as compelling as you think. One of my relatives found a little gold in the Klondike, which sounds interesting until you learn that there’s next to nothing else known about what he did there: the rest is supposition and hearsay. That’s about enough to cover half a page, no more. My own father was witness to, and the victim of, a war crime during World War 2, but that entire story can be told in a couple of paragraphs, too. (I’ve done just that elsewhere, in fact, in exactly one hundred words.) In truth I’ve only met one person whose life story I would love to read, or better still be the ghost writer for. She’s a fabulously funny woman who gave birth to quadruplets many years ago, two boys and two girls who were all incredibly competitive with each other. Not only that, but the mother herself would genuinely grace any comedy stand-up stage – she’s got that outgoing, bubbly personality that makes you want to hear her story. Ironically, she herself doesn’t think her story would interest many other people. And that’s really the problem: the writer isn’t always the best person to judge if the story is any good or not.

2. I’d like to become rich and/or famous.

Hmm… it would be nice, wouldn’t it? You dream that some nice publisher will come along and offer you enormous sums of money to publish your book. The chances of that are vanishingly small, and that’s not a reflection of your writing. Indeed, the better your writing, the less likely you are to make a fortune. When it comes to making a fortune, the subject matter is probably more important than the quality – witness how books by famous people with zero writing skills can be ghost-written. If someone famous manages to write something all by themselves, then a team of editors will be summoned to clean it up. In other words, if the public has already decided it wants to read the story, virtually anything can be made acceptable to sell in bookstores.

Sadly, your story won’t fall into that category or you wouldn’t be reading this book. The point about your book is that the general public doesn’t know the first thing about your book. You’re starting from scratch, whether you write fiction or non-fiction. No one will be knocking at your door asking to see what you’ve written, and from the very outset it’ll be your hard task to persuade agents, publishers, booksellers, newspaper and magazine reviewers – everyone, in fact, including Uncle Tom Cobley – that you’ve written something worth reading. And believe me, that’s hard. After all, there’s plenty of other stuff to read instead. You’ll struggle to give your book away. (As I explain later, I mean that.) The journalist and author Caitlin Moran once said on Desert Island Discs that when she first started out as a writer, she was told that ‘there’s no such thing as a professional writer; a professional writer is called a journalist.’ Terry Pratchett worked for 19 years, first of all as a journalist, then as a Press Officer for the Central Electrical Generating Board, before he finally felt confident enough to go full-time as a writer.

Now, before you reach for the whisky and the pearl-handled revolver, it’s important to make clear that I’m not saying that writing a book doesn’t bring you increased earnings. What I mean instead is that you’re highly unlikely to make money from the book itself. If you’ve written a book, or perhaps two or three or more, you can start to write other things – reviews, magazine articles and so on – and include in the by-line under your name something like ‘Gordon Lawrie is the author of the several novels including Four Old Geezers and a Valkyrie and The Blogger Who Came in from the Cold'. Even getting so far as to write the odd item for a newspaper or magazine takes a lot of luck and hard work, but that sort of stuff at least pays if you can land it.

But if you’re still a working person, then there is one other way that writing something, especially completing a full-scale book such as a novel can earn you money. You might think this is strange, but I’d urge anyone applying for a job to include the fact in the section at the end that invites you to ‘state any other hobbies, activities or outside interests that you feel might demonstrate what you could bring to this position.’ I’ve interviewed quite a lot of individuals over the years, and believe me it’s great when I see someone has included a few of the things they do: it gives the interview panel a more rounded picture of the person that they might appoint. Always remember that when you begin a job, you can always leave again if it’s not for you. It’s a lot harder for the employer to get rid of an employee who’s 'not for them'.

So… picture the scene: we’re coming to the end of an interview and the interviewer suddenly says,

‘I see you say that you’ve written a book. Would you like to tell us about it?’

You tell them about it, taking no more than ten seconds what it’s about. Be ready for that. They’re not really interested in the book at all, they’re interested in you, so don’t be a bore.

They continue, ‘So why did you put it down here on the form?’

Your answer sounds a bit like this:

‘I think completing a book/novel demonstrates that I have the ability to plan and organise, and that I have staying power even when things get tough. That happens a lot when you’re writing – it’s writer’s block, of course. It also demonstrates that I can take criticism – indeed I’m quite used to it, because anyone who produces any sort of art form has to live with the fact that many people will feel that gives them the opportunity to say whatever unpleasant things they like about what I write. And I’ve had to learn to smile sweetly, say thank you, and try to learn from it, no matter how hurt I’ve felt.’

You get the job, and the pay rise that goes with it. In fact, if you don’t get the job then you don’t want to be in that job anyway. They don't deserve you. But you do need a day job.

3. I enjoy writing – I want to write for my own satisfaction and pleasure.

Ah… now we have it, the ‘I really don’t care if no one reads my book or not’ reason for writing. The trouble is that, well, I don’t really think that’s quite true. Writing a book is not like doing a jigsaw, a crossword or a sudoku. You do care if people read your book, in fact you want them to read it and like it. So, this is just a hard front you’ve erected to allow you to pretend that you haven’t got feelings for that little baby of yours, your first book. (Curiously, I’m very protective of my first book, Four Old Geezers and a Valkyrie, much more than any of the later ones, although I’m sure the later ones are better written.)

For the moment, let’s just keep it between ourselves that you really do care about your book. I can see that you might want to erect a little shield to shelter behind when the inevitable mortar bombs land around you. (I really hope you do care, though, because otherwise there’s little point in this book trying to help you do something with your manuscript.) In the meantime, your official line is that you’re writing for your own pleasure, to set yourself a goal. Other people climb mountains, run marathons, tend gardens, study for Open University degrees or learn a foreign language; they do it to give their lives a purpose, or perhaps to provide an escape from their everyday existence. There’s no doubt that taking on a challenge is good for your health, so much so that when you cross the finishing line there’s an inevitable 'down' feeling which is only relieved by taking up a new challenge. It’s a credible motive.

The problem is that it’s not credible to an outsider. Once they find that you’ve taken up writing, your friends and relatives will never be done asking ‘how the book’s coming on’. They’ll want to see what you can come up with, and you’ll be desperate to make sure that your book is something you can be proud of.

And that’s where I come in, because there’s a right time and a wrong time to involve your friends and relatives. Let them know that you’re trying to write a book if you like – they’ll find out